Suruchi Agnihotri_OD&L Repository for M&As

Executive Summary:

Organization Development and Learning is a Human Resource Specialty which is a deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and/or efficiency and/or to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals [1]. Over my internship, I and my team were asked to build a tool for this department which will be used by HR people assigned to a Merger/ Acquisition (M&A). M&As are complex; although they happen all the time, yet study after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90% [2]. HR Processes play a big role in the success of M&As. With the organization that I interned with, the problem was there was no standard repository to guide HR generalists, HR Directors, or even business managers to guide through the process. Everyone acknowledged that the issue is important and needs to be handled, and HR people involved in previous M&As had made tools, gathered best practices for themselves, but they were not managed centrally, and learning was not being shared. My internship team created a model of the ‘would be OD and L repository’ after interviewing and collecting data from more than 50 people. I recreated the toned down version of the same repository.

1. Best Practices repository

Important ODnL processes in M&As are 1. Change Management 2. Culture 3. Organizational Design 4. Communication

M&A process timeline may be segregated as: 1. Due Diligence (Pre-integration) 2. Integration Planning (Pre-integration) 3. Month1(Year of Integration) 4. Months 2-12 (Year of integration)

These two dimensions are captured in the tool using a 2*2 matrix format. The processes that fall at the intersection of these dimensions are fetched and displayed from the already existing database. See this figure for the sample. Only the first row has actual phases as there might be some legal bindings

**Implementation also has been done for the first row (Change) only.

2. ‘Submit Best Practices’ tool

After an M&A is finished, it is required for the HR personnel involved in that particular project to submit all the best practices or any new learning.  The ‘Submit Best Practices’ Tool provides an interface for the HR personnel to accomplish this task. The person in the role submits best practices through the tool, which got to a ‘Draft data’ sheet, which is later analyzed by the Repository admin. Repository admin is notified via email on any new submission. The process of looking at submissions and adding to actual excel database is a manual process (looking and judging the validity of submission, removing duplications, adding in proper format). It is out of scope of this project.

3. ‘Search Merger Information’ tool

When a new HR person is assigned to an M&A project, he/she might need information about the previous M&As of the company, and the people involved in that. This is a very useful process for learning. Search merger Information tool lets the user search on the basis of Region, Merger Type, Year, or a combination of these. The search returns corresponding M&A names, and on selecting a merger name and searching further, Merger Details are shown. No editing is possible on this tool.

Links:

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14w/sur14/ODnL_repository_for_MnA.xlsm

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14w/sur14/ODnLRepository_for_MnA.pdf